Estrangement: Six New Words

“I’m not close with my mother.”

Time and time again, I offered these words, the way one might offer an opinion about whether or not they liked cucumbers.

Cocktail parties.

Book club.

During dinner with my in-laws.

I always kept my voice neutral when I said it. I made sure my shoulders were relaxed. I didn’t want to invite further conversation.

After all, what kind of freak, or weirdo, or misfit, doesn’t talk to her own mother?

I didn’t.

Six words.

I pretended they were meaningless – as though they cost me nothing at all to say. It was a benign answer to a somewhat loaded topic. For me, anyway. 

I had planned on talking about it zero times. The estrangement. The twelve conversations in as many years. The fact that she met my youngest son perhaps twice. How I never listed her as my emergency contact on medical forms or called her when I had a bad day.

And then she died. 

No one expected it, least of all me. Under a mid-summer sky, I walked into the hospital. Beneath my ribcage, I knew once I left, I would never be back again.

Like most people, inside my heart is a glossary of non-words, for some moments are impossible to capture no matter how many syllables you cobble together. 

These non-words, they are an experience bigger than language can hold.

Afterward, I found all I wanted to do was talk.

I wanted to talk about the dysfunction, the shame, the little band of family held together by secrets.

But how?

Who do you tell?

How do you explain the way these memories are punctuated by pure goodness?

You see, our family was a beautiful idea.

Dinner around the table at night. 

Sunday school every week. 

Good grades on report cards.

We were a beautiful idea, but we were a mess in the nighttime.

We were smashed plates. 

We were chaos and eggshells.

We were unaddressed mental illness shrouded in a fierce kind of love.

If I was on a game show as a child, and someone asked me what is a family, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. 

From a six-year old’s eyes, I would have said a family is a father leaving a mother on a grey day in springtime.

Suitcases on the front porch.

Visitation rights, court orders, screaming matches on the front lawn while the neighbors watch helplessly.

What’s wrong with me?

Every now and again, this was what I asked myself.

I ask myself. 

My mother. 

So often, I wondered if I let her go too easily. I wondered if I gave up, if I should have tried harder. 

Never once did I consider how easily she let me go.

Beneath the hospital lights, I reach once more for the glossary without words. I try to capture the sensation of never having a mother again, even though I was never sure I had one in the first place. 

I know nothing about her, I insist to myself. 

Yet I know everything.

I know her favorite song, the perfume she always wore, the way she liked her macaroni salad with extra mayonnaise.

I know the shape of her hands, her sudden smile, her head tilt.

Here, beneath these lights, we are briefly beautiful again. 

Six new words.

Over and over we said them, a mother-daughter circle of apology, of forgiveness, of redemption.

We did the best we could.

She never liked cucumbers. She said they had no flavor.